Nicholas Stuart is a columnist with the Canberra Times.
Nick Stuart has written three books,
Kevin Rudd: An Unauthorised Political Biography;
What Goes Up: Behind the 2007 Election; and
Rudd's Way: November 2007 - June 2010.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

PIERRE RYCKMANS

Because of lack of space I was unable to highlight so many of the remarkable aspects of this brilliant, acute analyst in this piece written for the Canberra Times . . .

PIERRE RYCKMANS – SIMON LEYS

Professor Pierre Ryckmans; born on
Confucius Day (28 September) 1935, died 11 August 2014.

You can tell a great deal from
the way sentences are put together. Sometimes the words circle round a thought.
They come close to expressing an idea when a sudden, infelicitous turn of
phrase spins the reader round and sends thoughts careering off in another direction.
Occasionally it’s the other way round; the prose is precise and the idea poorly
expressed. The ability to find the perfect match is rare: the capacity to do so
in more than one language is so remarkable that you’d expect it to breed
arrogance and hauteur.

Pierre Ryckmans – who wrote under
the pseudonym Simon Leys – possessed a remarkable ability to marry both the
technical requirements of writing with ideas and descriptions that could fire
and excite the imagination. After his death on Monday this is the thread that
will run through the many obituaries that will describe his life and
achievements; yet, fine though these are, that’s not what Ryckmans meant to me.
Describing this requires a story, one dealing with the controversial
intersection between individual life and politics and of being imbedded within
a culture yet still retaining the ability to examine it from outside.

You see, I didn’t meet Ryckmans
because he was a famous author. Indeed, he probably wouldn’t have been
interested in meeting me if that was my motivation: he had more than enough
admirers. But he was vitally concerned with the direction of the world, and
Australia. He agreed to speak to me about Kevin Rudd, a former student whose
honours thesis he’d supervised.

Ryckmans’ house stood on a
suburban street like any other. Well, perhaps that’s not quite true, because it
sits on the side of a hill instead of the flat, and it possesses the bold red
door that’s more appropriate for a China expert and ANU Professor than the sort
of nondescript portal that opening onto the home of a public servant. But what
surprised me was not just how clearly he recalled the young man he’d taught so
long ago, but his insight into Rudd’s then developing personality.

I’d entered hoping simply for a
few lines to contribute to a political biography I was writing of the then
opposition leader and that’s the way I began. Simple, once over lightly, do you
remember the young student from so long ago and what did you think of him if
you do? Ryckmans quickly brushed my opening gambit aside. His right arm waved
in the air as he leant forward, piercing me with his eyes. A sudden clattering
noise came from the kitchen, breaking the sudden silence. If that was all I
wanted, he said, he wasn’t interested in speaking to me. The interview stopped
as he first probed me, worked out what I really wanted to ask, and then
responded. He was concerned about precision, clarifying his meaning before
sitting back and waiting for me to try again. What was to emerge, over the next
hour and a half, was everything I could have hoped for: a detailed portrait of
an individual combining clear recollections of the past with hope for Ryckmans’
adopted country’s future. This was combined with optimistic glimpses of how
Australia might – under a new, inspired and educated leadership – forge a
dynamic culture and a comfortable home in our region.

This would, as it happened, not
come to pass, however that didn’t stop Ryckmans determination to do anything he
could to help humanity tackle the fundamental issues confronting us. Born in
Brussels in 1935 he studied law at Leuven before leaving Europe to study in
Taiwan. His love of Chinese blossomed into an engagement with that society that
allowed Ryckmans to reveal truths at a deeper level than a study of language
alone reveals.

As the ‘cultural revolution’
progressed he became a scathing critic of the destruction he was witnessing.
Ryckmans didn’t shy away from controversy and was equally contemptuous of Mao’s
Western defenders as he was of the Red Guards that trampled the world’s oldest
continuous culture underfoot. It was at this time, so he could continue to
forthrightly express his views while at the same time engaging with China, that
he adopted the pen-name Leys (after a character in a novel by a French polymath
who’d lived in Asia).

Ryckmans had moved to Hong Kong,
which proved a perfect point from which to observe the terror that was
shuddering through the mainland. His ensuing book, The Chairman’s New Clothes
(Les habits neufs du président Mao) provided the first,
best, immediate and detailed picture of what was happening during this traumatic
time.

His accurate and scathing
analysis of China continued when he settled in Canberra as a professor.
Ryckmans displayed a remarkable ability to traverse a range of fields, moving
easily from pure contemporary political analysis to combining this with the
insights of personal reflection in books like Chinese Shadows (Ombres Chinoises). This study went
beyond the bright lights and shallow overviews to probe what was happening
off-stage, beyond the sight of the traditional media with its obsession with the
doings of the great, bad and mad.

After moving to Canberra Ryckmans
began to extend his writing, using it as a chance to probe deep inside our
concepts of personality and humanity. Although he was personally disappointed by
the result when his playful novel, The death of Napoleon was made into
a film, this was perhaps not unexpected. Ryckmans was a hard taskmaster: he
expected the same precision and dedication to truth and exactness from others
as he demanded from himself.

And he would not bend. His
manuscripts were always, according to his publisher, detailed, clear and
hand-written. He loved practicing the flow of the brush-strokes of Chinese
characters, combining of the precision of ideas with the surge of emotion. But,
most of all, Ryckmans would not be categorised and pushed into a pigeonhole.

At times this could be to his own
detriment. An Ambassador once complained to me, “the famous academic didn’t
turn up for lunch with a visiting politician”; seemingly surprised that
Ryckmans might have had something better to do than eat with a middling (if otherwise
inoffensive) bureaucrat who’s chief attribute seemed to be that his extraordinary
ordinariness was likely to make him an excellent candidate for the ministry.

Ryckmans challenged himself, and
us all, to think. A recent essay describes his astonishment at discovering
people consider it insulting to be compared to Don Quixote. Ever hopeful,
Ryckmans enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to discover de quoi s’agit – what it (life) is
about.

Ryckmans’ wife, Han Fang, pretends
dismissively she was nothing more than Sancho Panza. Her confidence comes from
being secure in the knowledge that she, and their children, provided the secure
citadel that allowed her knight to venture forth, slaying the dragons of
complacency and smugness.

In the early hours of Monday
morning a red moon spread across Sydney harbour where Ryckmans, consumed by
cancer, had spent his last months at Rushcutters Bay. He turned quietly, look
at his wife, and died. He was surrounded by his children; Etienne, Marc, Louis
and Jeanne, son and daughter-in-law, and grandchildren.

No one else has fought more
strongly, more strenuously, to tell the stories of ordinary people caught up in
a world of change.